The Sales Operations Guide To Increasing Productivity Through Mobility 1
Table of Contents Sales Enablement Today 3 Improving Sales Productivity 3 Challenges of Sales Ops Teams 6 The Right Approach 10 Sales Operations & I.T. Strengths 11 I.T. Focus & Activities 12 Sales Operations Focus & Activities 13 The Tools to Make it Possible 14 The Sales Operations Guide To Increasing Productivity Through Mobility 2
Sales Enablement Today 'Sales Enablement' has a brand new meaning today. It is no longer only about sales processes, assets and tools, CRM updates, sales training or sales operations. Now, it is all about enabling Sales teams to be leaner, meaner sales machines. Sales teams need to be more productive in the field than ever. Remaining competitive means reducing sales cycles and increasing revenue opportunities. The primary goal of any sales operations team today is to improve sales productivity and contribute to the company top line. In today's landscape, this can only be achieved using the latest technologies such as the cloud and mobile. Sales operations personnel need to understand and be on top of the latest technologies, and leverage innovations to their advantage. Time is of the essence. The earlier they leverage, the more likely their sales teams will gain a competitive advantage. Improving Sales Productivity Sales Operations can improve sales productivity, and provide competitive advantages for their field sales teams in a number of ways, depending on: Industry Sales Processes Geographic Region Product Mix Much More... The Sales Operations Guide To Increasing Productivity Through Mobility 3
Below are some use cases of how field sales personnel are making a difference with mobility and cloud technologies: Sales Collateral Field sales personnel need collateral like product catalogs, presentations, and price lists. No one carries briefcases of documents anymore. Electronic versions of these documents boost productivity and convenience for field sales teams. Providing these documents over mobile devices just makes sense. At the same time, however, Sales Operations needs the ability to ensure which authorized personnel have access to which documents, and that the right versions are being accessed. There is also a need to manage authorizations and permissions to ensure confidential documents don't fall into the wrong hands. Mobile CRM Mobile-enabling typical CRM functions, like activity management, contact management, account management, and opportunity management, enable sales personnel to arm themselves with the best data for a customer meetings. At the same time, it can also enable a real-time view of field sales activities. One challenge is the aggregation of data to fully equip field sales. Not all information a salesperson needs will reside on a single system. Getting access to multiple data sources at the right time, in an easily consumable manner is essential to a productive and efficient sales process. 360 Degree Customer View More often than not, depending on the industry, a sales person needs a complete portfolio view of the customer; like historical orders, quotes, The Sales Operations Guide To Increasing Productivity Through Mobility 4
current order status, shipment or partial shipments, delivery status as well outstanding invoices, open service tickets, client issues, and operational data such as historical orders, before walking into a meeting. Mobile apps require information, or interaction, from multiple systems within the organization. Sales Operations need to consider business rules, data integrations authorizations, security, and other essential considerations, before trying to enable these kinds of apps. Pricing or Delivery Calculator In certain industries, field sales personnel can save a lot of time, and reduce sales cycles, if they can answer questions in the moment. There are many scenarios where a salesperson may need to access product pricing, delivery timelines, discounts given based on certain parameters, and profit margins. Most Sales Operations teams would love to enable such capability to their field personnel, but these apps are complex and time consuming to develop. Field sales personnel get the most value from mobile apps when they can interact with systems that live and breathe in the organization. These apps are composite in nature; combining business rules and data from multiple systems. This makes them complex to build, and complex to deploy and manage as well. The Sales Operations Guide To Increasing Productivity Through Mobility 5
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Most Sales Operations teams understand the value of technology like mobility. It empowers sales teams, improves productivity, increases customer responsiveness, optimizes processes and contributes to the top line. At the same time, given the complex nature of the most value adding apps for field sales, most sales operations fall short on the best way to go about mobile enabling their sales teams. Most sales operations teams see two choices: 1. Work with their centralized IT for mobile enablement. 2. Outsource mobile development to 3rd party development shops. Working with Centralized IT Most Sales Operations teams realize this is the right way to mobilize their sales teams. IT has the technical expertise, and will manage the technical aspects such as security and infrastructure, and provide the corporate support. They also tend to stay away from IT for the following reasons: I.T. typically has a backlog of requests, and is slow to respond. Long bureaucratic processes to initiate projects and get apps from I.T. Delayed delivery times due to competing priorities from other departments. Business stakeholders, like field sales teams, pressuring for faster delivery than I.T. can accommodate. Losing a competitive edge if competitors have this app first. Not enough control on the app development process. Delays have direct impact on sales targets they must meet every quarter. The Sales Operations Guide To Increasing Productivity Through Mobility 7
In essence, time is money for sales teams. There is always a rush to get better tools, improve productivity, and meet targets. As a result, most Sales Operations teams decide to skip working with I.T. and opt, instead, to work with a 3rd party. Outsourcing Mobile Development To get around the responsiveness problems with their I.T. departments, some sales ops teams decide to outsource mobile app development to boutique development shops and I.T. consulting firms. This choice is primarily driven by the need to deliver faster. Some advantages of using 3rd party development shops are: Faster delivery of apps compared to I.T. Better control of the app development process. Easier to meet business stakeholder expectations. There are some significant disadvantages of this approach as well: Lack of Control Most 3rd party development shops will use the technology that they are most comfortable with, which may or may not really be in your favor Ability to Take it In-House It is always very difficult for Sales operations teams to take the project inhouse, as there will never be enough developer resources to take it in and manage it The Sales Operations Guide To Increasing Productivity Through Mobility 8
Changes Are Expensive Mobile apps, especially employee facing apps needs constant updates and every-time a change is required, it costs time and money to make those changes Limited Access to Backend Enterprise Data It is very difficult to get access to sensitive data from enterprise backend applications without involving IT or having the blessing of IT to use the data Increased Maintenance Costs In the long run, it becomes more difficult and expensive to maintain these apps. ROI is dramatically reduced as time goes by. The app suffers lower user adoption from lack of expedient upgrades, or the outsourced development becomes too expensive and the app ceased to improve; eventually dying. The bread-n-butter of any development shop is the time spent on development. The more time spent on developing the apps, the more they charge the client. This doesn't mean 3rd party providers aren't working in inefficient ways, or using inefficient technologies. But there is a glaring lack of incentive for delivering the app faster than you asked for, or under budget. Regardless of which method sales ops team adopt for developing their mobile apps, they are usually met with frustration and productivity-killing delays. It's always been the case. What if there was a better way to mobile-enable your sales team? What if I.T. and Sales Operations could work together without the lack of responsiveness? What if there was a way to bypass the lack of bandwidth challenge from I.T. and still not have to deal with the disadvantages of outsourcing development? The Sales Operations Guide To Increasing Productivity Through Mobility 9
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The best way to mobile enable your sales operations and processes is to work in a way that leverages the strengths of each team for the good of the common goal: a mobile-enabled sales team. Sales Ops Strengths: Understanding the sales processes, as well as the core technology. They understand the capabilities of their mobile devices. Thus, they are able to innovate and re-invent sales processes in a way that leverages all the capabilities of their mobile device. Understanding the user experience for field sales teams. User experience is not always how flashy an app looks, it hinges more on how functional and productive the app is to its users. Enabling and encouraging user adoption. The Sales Operations are really the best people to know what their end users want and are really the best people to design the app workflow to solve real business problems. Managing the changes and life expectancy of the app. Sometimes an app may have a very short life or a long one, depending on the changing business needs and the Sales operations people are the best people to estimate and manage it I.T. Strengths: Managing backend applications for its stability, security and scalability. Enable specific data of the backend applications for mobile consumption Managing the integrations, complex business rules and authorizations for mobile apps The Sales Operations Guide To Increasing Productivity Through Mobility 11
Mash up data and business rules across business applications Maintaining the sanctity of enterprise data and all enterprise applications. Looking at the strengths of each unit, there will be minor overlaps between IT and Sales Operations. But both are normally, mutually exclusive in their strengths. You need an approach that can leverage the strengths from each organization within the enterprise. Below is a high-level strategy that can be implemented by Sales Ops and I.T. together. Each department focuses on its area of strength, with the above requirements and limitations in mind. IT Focus & Activities Expose the right business objects and data for mobile enablement. And to do so in a way that can be easily interpreted and understood by Sales Operations. Manage backend applications, integrations, and frequency rates at which backend source applications will be pinged for data. Manage the security, authorizations, and scalability of the backend applications. Monitor and track all data and app usage. The Sales Operations Guide To Increasing Productivity Through Mobility 12
Sales Operations Focus / Activities Assuming I.T. can enable the right business objects and data for mobile consumption, as well as take care of all the backend activities, Sales Ops can focus on leveraging these objects and mobilizing them as appropriate. Innovate and build mobile apps based on the exposed business objects. Modify and change apps at the pace of business. Deploy and manage apps for sales teams. Reinvent business processes leveraging the capabilities of mobile devices. Build single mobile apps based on user workflows that consolidate business objects and data from multiple systems, simultaneously. Focus on user experience and the business functionality of the app. Take responsibility of user adoption and measuring productivity gains. This requires technology for Sales Operations to visually build their apps in a drag-n-drop environment with little-to-no-coding required. Is this possible today? This all sounds rosy and great, but the most common question is: is this possible today given the state of enterprise mobile technologies? The answer to that question is, absolutely! You'll need a single platform or set of tools specifically designed for Sales Operations to design mobile apps, and that also allows for I.T. to integrate various systems, as well as, manage security, performance, monitoring, etc., all in a code-less, visual, drag-n-drop environment. The Sales Operations Guide To Increasing Productivity Through Mobility 13
No programming skills should be required, especially for the Sales Operations personnel, to build and deploy the apps. There are a small handful of platforms that are this complete and mature, but careful evaluation is required to determine which platform will work best for your needs. Utilizing such a complete platform makes it much easier to deploy and manage the mobility policies and governance across the entire organization. The appsfreedom Platform The appsfreedom Platform is a complete, code-less, rapid mobile app development platform. It's designed for such a mobility strategy and provides for the elaborate and varied needs of both the Sales Operations and I.T. teams in an organization. It's flexible to allow IT to maintain governance, control, and expose appropriate business objects to Sales Operations. At the same time, it can enable Sales Operations to rapidly, build and deploy mobile apps from business processes, in a visual, drag-n-drop environment; all with no programming requirements on all mobile devices simultaneously. It was built to offer the versatility and flexibility for Sales Operations to mobile enable their teams faster than ever, without compromising control or ROI. See how it can work for you, take a test drive the platform. IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII The Sales Operations Guide To Increasing Productivity Through Mobility 14